The cactus has yellow flowers

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, May 31, 2001

OUTSIDE MY WINDOW on the back deck is a gray glass-topped table, and on the table is a large cactus. It was a birthday gift to me from my wife before she was my wife; we figure it's from 1980, which means it is almost old enough to drink.

I have no idea what kind of cactus it is. The state of cactus reference books is shocking. It looks like a second cousin to a beaver-tail cactus, with flat, ovoid, fleshy pads and, at the moment, rows of flower buds along the upper curves of the branches. One flower, an improbably bright yellow, has already burst forth, hoping for bees and getting hummingbirds.

The spines of the cactus are small and sneaky; brush up against them and you'll feel nothing. Later on, you'll realize you've got 50 or 60 prickles, usually on a knuckle or a forearm. It takes forever to remove them.

A 20-year-old cactus is pretty gnarly, in both senses of the word. The bottom part is brown and twisted, covered with scaly things that look menacing but are in fact soft and thorn-free. The cactus has a fractal-like shape, circles springing improbably from other circles, twisting around the central axis of the stem, following dictates of its own devising.

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It is not a pretty plant; most people never notice it. Even its flowers, though brilliant, are small and easily missed. We have gaudier cactuses; heck, we have gaudier fir trees. But it is the only living thing other than our personal selves that has been with us for almost our entire journey together. It started in Santa Monica and moved north. Some years it gave no flowers at all and appeared disconsolate; other years (like this one) it has burst forth with new pads, as light green as the new leaves of the Hypericum "Summergold" we have planted near it, and dozens of flowers, so the cactus seems suddenly young again until you look downward at its dark, ancient base.

SO YESTERDAY I was staring at it. I stare a lot; it's a useful form of sloth. I thought about the cactus as a metaphor for our marriage, which will itself hit the 20-year mark in a few months.

Our marriage too is hard to diagram, fractal in nature. It has grown organically, in response to pressures both external and internal, and viewed from the outside, it's hard to see its structure. (Viewed from the inside, it's even harder -- we ceased trying long ago.)

Its base is beginning to seem ancient as well, as we move further in time from the two people who fell rather violently in love with each other at about the time Jimmy Carter became president. But it is still soft to the touch; we certainly have regrets, individual and collective, but they involve -- to stretch the metaphor perhaps too far -- some of the twists and turns farther up the plant.

There were years in which we produced no flowers. It was hard to know why then; it's hard to know why now.

OUR CACTUS MARRIAGE has spines. It knows how to protect itself. An attack against one is an attack against both; indeed, we are each more intemperate about perceived slights to the other than we are about our own setbacks.

There is a man who tried to get Tracy fired once; I have only recently realized that I will never be able to kill him. I will soon be a grandfather; I don't want my grandchildren's lives to start out with Gramps in jail. "I remember visiting day" -- no, not a good family dynamic.

But there's something else: The cactus reminds me that I am in a menage a trois, and have been for some time. There's me, and there's her, and there's the marriage. We are equal partners. The marriage gets a vote. None of us knows exactly where we're going, but we're going there together, rooted as we are in the same earth.

The tricky extended-metaphor deal; nothing up his sleeves except his arms.